Baptism And Formation

Our church organist approached me with a concern.  A man who had been attending for some time appeared to be dying.  I had visited him and prayed with him, but she was worried because, he “hadn’t made that decision.”  When she tried to talk to him about it he told her about his baptism; he had been baptized as an adult at another church before he came to ours.  But he “hadn’t made that decision,” so she wanted me to go and talk to him about it.

I started thinking about this afterward.  Why is “making that decision,” whatever this really means, more important and decisive than receiving baptism?  The stereotypical Evangelical formula of accepting Jesus as one’s personal Savior is not a biblical idea, nor is “making that decision.”  But baptism is.  And yet, for many evangelicals, baptism is seriously diminished, and the thing that really counts is making a decision, or praying the sinner’s prayer, or whatever form of conversion is in vogue with that group.

And yet, baptism is clearly taught by Jesus and has been practiced in the church since the beginning.  The Great Commission includes a command to baptize, not to persuade people to accept Jesus as their personal savior.  So why is baptism ignored in some circles?  Or, if not ignored, pushed into the background, treated as relatively unimportant.  I’m sure our organist would have subscribed to our denomination’s view that baptism is only a public witness, or statement, of one’s faith.  So “making that decision” was the place where the exercise of saving faith took place, and the only function of baptism was to make that public.

But I also remember in the past being puzzled about the value of baptism.  It goes by very quickly; what if I wasn’t properly recollected at that moment?  I didn’t think this would cancel out my baptism, but I was concerned that maybe I didn’t receive all I could have, and now my one chance was over.  I didn’t know at the time about Martin Luther’s emphasis on the spiritual benefits of looking back on our baptism.

When Paul speaks about us having died and risen with Christ in baptism, it’s difficult to believe that he saw baptism as nothing but a public statement of a private, personal faith.  Baptism is much more important than that and it has an ongoing effect on our lives in Christ as we remind ourselves of what took place when we were baptized into the death and resurrection of Jesus.  The practice, in some churches, of making the sign of the cross with holy water, is meant to be a reminder, a making-present, of one’s baptism.

So I now think it doesn’t really matter whether or not I was perfectly recollected at the moment of my baptism.  I probably was not.  What is important is to know that I was baptized into the death and resurrection of Jesus and to bring this to mind often; to know that this leads to a new life of following Jesus, and to live increasingly in the light of my baptism. 

Why I Read Frederick Buechner

My first exposure to Frederick Buechner was a recorded sermon that was assigned for an independent study in homiletics.  I don’t remember anything about the sermon except that I didn’t like it and thought his vision of the Christian life was less than it should have been. 

A few years later I read Lion Country, the first of four novels centered around Leo Bebb, and my reaction to that was about the same.  Leo Bebb and his associates are not very impressive people, to say the least, and God doesn’t intervene in their lives to turn them around; they just go on in the same way throughout the series.  I had heard and read of God doing extraordinary things in people’s lives, dramatic, overwhelming things.  Like in A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God, by Jonathan Edwards, or the story of DL Moody experiencing the Holy Spirit and asking God to stop because he felt like he couldn’t take any more.  My expectation, at this point, was that this is the way God normally works in the lives of His people, by making His presence known in overwhelming and unmistakable ways, and I was disappointed, maybe even offended, by what I took to be Buechner’s low expectations.

But I’ve changed my mind since then.  My outlook when I was younger was colored by some measure of youthful idealism, I think.  And I didn’t pay enough attention to Edwards’ description of this work of God as “surprising.”  What he saw happening was not the norm; it took him by surprise, which led him to report at length on it.

Buechner has a very good description of what he is doing, in both his sermons and novels, in one of his memoirs: “I discovered that if you really keep your eye peeled to it and your ears open, if you really pay attention to it, even such a limited and limiting life as the one I was living… opened up onto extraordinary vistas…. There is no event so commonplace but that God is present within it, always hiddenly, always leaving you room to recognize him or not to recognize him, but all the more fascinatingly because of that, all the more compellingly and hauntingly…. If I were called upon to state in a few words the essence of everything I was trying to say both as a novelist and as a preacher, it would be something like this: Listen to your life.  See it for the fathomless mystery that it is.  In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace” (Now and Then).

Buechner’s character Leo Bebb is not an attractive person, certainly not someone to follow as an example, but he is also not a charlatan. I think Bebb is a good illustration of the fact that people are not one-dimensional, that there is very often more to them than we can see on the surface and that it is a mistake to write them off too easily.  God’s grace is compatible with large inconsistencies in the lives of His people.

Sonny, in the movie “The Apostle,” with Robert Duvall, is similar to Bebb.  He genuinely believes the things he preaches, but he is very deeply flawed; things don’t go well in his life, but he continues preaching the gospel till the end.  Roger Ebert says this in his review: “Sonny is different from most movie preachers. He's not a fraud, for one thing; Hollywood tilts toward the Elmer Gantry stereotype. Sonny has a one-on-one relationship with God, takes his work seriously, and in the movie's opening scene, the preacher pauses at an auto accident to ask one of the victims to accept Jesus Christ, “who you're going to soon meet.” Sonny is flawed, with a quick temper, but he's a good man, and the film is about his struggle back to redemption after his anger explodes.”  A deeply flawed character, but not a charlatan.  Not quite the hero we might hope for, but, if we’re honest, much closer reality than we’d like.  And with all his faults, God uses him to bring people to Himself.

When Mary and Joseph presented Jesus in the temple, most of those who were present missed it, because it was just an ordinary everyday event.  Buechner exhorts his readers to pay attention, because God often appears in ways that are easy to miss.  And because of this, God’s presence always appears hiddenly in Buechner’s novels, sometimes disturbingly so, but I think this is a good thing.  It might teach us to be more attentive and recognize when God appears in hidden and unexpected ways in our own lives.

Some Thoughts on the Jesus Movement

I first heard about Jesus Freaks through Cheech and Chong: “I used to be all messed up on drugs, but then I found the Lord; now I’m all messed up on the Lord.”  The idea was that people were finding, in Christ, what they had previously been seeking in drugs.  The first real Jesus Freak I remember in Sonoma was a guy named Jonathan.  He dressed like a hippy and talked to people about Jesus all over town.  Everyone knew of him.

I was behind him once at the grocery store, and as he was leaving he noticed an older woman gawking at him and said to her, “Jesus loves you.”  The woman’s response struck me as very odd; you would have thought he had slapped her or threatened her physically in some way, because she reacted with what looked like fear.  This didn’t seem like an appropriate response to either his words or his manner.   And a few years later I attended the church he had belonged to, Sonoma Mountain Lighthouse, and people who knew him described him as a very gentle and loving person, just as he had appeared that day at the grocery store. 

I had, sometime after seeing him in the grocery store, become a Christian through an Assembly of God church in Santa Rosa.  Then immediately after this I went into the Navy, and while I was in training in San Diego I and some friends spent the day with some people from a Calvary Chapel, where they were having a baptism and celebration at the beach.  The one thing that stands out in my mind from that day is that these people were hungry to know more of God.

About a year later, while I was stationed in Naples, Italy, on the USS Piedmont, I stumbled across a tent ministry called Christ is the Answer, which, in their words, “grew from the grass roots of the Jesus People movement in the late 1960's and early 1970's.”  They were in Naples for a number of weeks, and I hung out with them every possible moment; then, a few months later, a group of us stayed with them again in Munich while we were on leave.

The people I met in the Jesus Movement had problems, and I don’t doubt that many of them had questionable theological ideas, things that would concern me today.  But they, as a group, wanted to know more of God.  Hunger for God was encouraged and welcomed, as well as an openness to different sources of learning and encountering Him.  They very often spurred me on by their examples and their words.

I was struck by this years later when the denomination I was part of embraced worship in ways that reminded me, in some ways, of the Jesus Movement.  They wanted to be contemporary and made use of modern choruses and worship songs.  But the similarity was only superficial.  In the Jesus Movement, anything that gave us more of God was welcomed and celebrated.  During an open time at Sonoma Mountain Lighthouse, I remember one of the women quoting words from the hymn “All Hail the Power of Jesus’ Name,” and being moved and encouraged by that.  I didn’t know any hymns, and hearing these words opened new doors for me.  This kind of experience was a regular occurrence, not a one-time thing.  

In the church plants of my denomination, hymns were off limits, because these only belonged in “traditional services.”  And, of course, they also would not include any silence, because it might interrupt the flow of the worship experience.  But even more troubling, in my interactions with them and in their corporate worship there was little-to-no sense of hunger for God.  The focus was on growing the church, attracting outsiders and being careful to not offend anyone; encountering God in new and unexpected ways was not at all on not the table.

Cheech and Chong, even though they were joking, were really on the right track.  People don’t use drugs for no reason; they do it to find something that is lacking in their present experience.  As St. Augustine says, “You made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.”  Our condition as fallen human beings is that our hearts are restless because we are out of sync with our Creator, so our hearts seek rest in other things, which for some people leads to using drugs.

The people I met in the Jesus Movement had found rest for their souls and could say, also with St. Augustine, “You were within, but I was outside, searching for You there — plunging, deformed amid all those fair forms which You had made.  You were with me, but I was not with You.  Things held me far from You, which, unless they were in You did not exist at all.  You called and shouted, and burst my deafness.  You gleamed and shone upon me, and chased away my blindness.”  And because of this, because God had chased away their blindness and burst their deafness, the longing of their hearts was to know more of Him. 

Formation Through Reading and Worship

My favorite biography is “George Whitefield,” by Arnold Dallimore.  It fills two large volumes but does a great job not only with Whitefield himself, but also with his friends and others from the Great Awakening.  One friend decided to read it on my recommendation, but then went on to say he was going to speed read it, because “only what I remember is of value to me.”  (And, I suspect, he was especially interested in finding material to use in his sermons).

But reading is not just filling our minds with information. If the only benefit of reading came from what I could remember, most of my reading over the years would be pointless.  The truth is that we are being formed by the things we engage with, whether for good or ill.  As I encounter the ideas of another person in a book, my mind is being formed in a particular direction.

This doesn’t mean that I am a passive recipient of whatever the book has to offer.  As I read, I can, and should, be involved in the process, engaging my mind, thinking critically about what I am reading.  And as I interact in this way with the author, my mind is also being formed even more than I am aware of at the time.  In reading, we are not just out to get information (especially information we might be able to use in some way); we are learning to think and are engaging with the mind of the person we’re reading (and, in the case of a biography like that on George Whitefield, with that of the person we’re reading about).

I’ve noticed a similar phenomenon in worship, both private and corporate.  For many years I assumed that spiritual exercises were only of value when I was fully engaged, and especially when my emotions were involved.  Like many evangelicals, I saw liturgical worship as something inimical to true worship “in spirit and in truth.”  Liturgy is something one just rattles off, and worship should be “from the heart.”  I’ve often spoken of visiting a sick man in the hospital who had been plagued with one thing after another.  He said to me, “I don’t even know what to pray anymore.”  So I suggested using the Psalms as prayers to give voice to things he couldn’t say clearly, but his response was contemptuous: “I thought we were supposed to pray from the heart.”

Where, though, did we get the idea that praying from the heart means, of necessity, praying off the top of one’s head?  Does prayer have to be extemporaneous to be genuine?  What, then, about singing choruses, a practice many evangelicals find very meaningful?  These are not words that occur in the moment but ones that have been prepared ahead of time.  So why cannot this also be the case in our prayer and worship?  I began finding immense help, about 25 years ago, in using written prayers to guide and supplement my prayer life.

But in prayer and worship, also, like in reading, we’re not only concerned with the immediate effect or experience.  When we engage in worship we are being formed, for better or worse.  And if in our prayers and worship we are just saying over and over again what comes into our minds (because, at least for very many of us, praying off the top of our heads leads to praying in a circle) we can easily end up reinforcing our own self-centeredness.  Liturgy can help us break out of this cycle, and it also is forming us with the words of Scripture and the historic Church.

A good question to ask ourselves, about both our reading and spiritual exercises is, “what might be the longer-term effects of this practice?”  “How am I being formed as I engage with this material?”  The direction I am being moved in is far more important than how I feel about what I am doing at the moment or what details I can remember in the future.

A Change of Identity

When people ask me where I’m from I always say “Northern California,” even though I haven’t lived there since 1977.  It’s where I grew up, where much of my personality was formed, and I still think of myself as a Northern Californian.  Identity is important.  We want to know who we are and where we belong.  

I think this explains the appeal of identity politics: I believe their approach is seriously wrongheaded and leads, among other things, to increased tribalization and division between competing groups.  But the appeal is a sense of connection and belonging; in our fragmented culture, people long for this, having an identity in relation to others.

I had a startling realization of this when I arrived for boot camp in San Diego in 1974.   We were lined up in front of a sign that stated: “You are now men of the United States Navy” and went on to say that we would be expected to act accordingly.  They wanted us to know, right at the beginning, that our identity as members of the Navy was to impact our actions.  It was jarring at the moment, but I also remember that it was very inspiring, providing both a sense of identity and purpose, of belonging to something larger than myself.

In Joshua 5:9, the people of Israel are receiving a change of identity.  They are to begin looking at themselves differently than they have done up to now.  They are no longer slaves, as they had been in Egypt, but are now free people.  “Today I have rolled away the reproach (or “disgrace,” NRSV) of Egypt from you.”

But the thing I find interesting about this is that they had been delivered from slavery at the Exodus, more than 40 years before this.  None of the people hearing these words had actually experienced life in slavery.  Their parents had, but they had left that behind 40 years earlier.  So why did it take so long for their disgrace to be “rolled away?”  And why now, at this moment? 

This isn’t the first time they’ve been on the verge of entering the land.  Their parents had arrived at the entrance to Canaan before this but had rebelled against God and refused to enter.  The 40-year gap was a judgement.  And despite the leadership of Moses throughout this time, it appears not to have been a good time spiritually for the nation, and they had, in fact, not practiced circumcision on those who were born in the wilderness. They had seen God’s judgement on the gods of Egypt and His miraculous deliverance from a life of slavery, and they had seen God revealed in many ways in the wilderness, but for the most part they were not responding in obedience and faith.

After crossing the Jordan, but before conquering Jericho, the first thing they do upon entering the land is to circumcise the whole nation.  This seems unnecessarily risky to me.  Why not do this before crossing over, since while they’re healing they are vulnerable to attack?  But God calls them to do it this way and provides for their safety during the recovery.  And it is after they have successfully crossed the Jordan and have been circumcised that God says He has “rolled away the reproach of Egypt.”

This is when they have truly formed a new identity, no longer as slaves but as free people who belong to God.  They are no longer in Egypt, the place of slavery, nor are they on a journey in the wilderness; they are now in their own land, which God had promised, and are set apart as people who belong to God.  The rolling away of the disgrace of Egypt is not only being freed from slavery — as in the Exodus — but forming a new identity as the people of God, set apart for Him in the place He has provided.  Their identity is not just a negative one — “not slaves” — but a positive one — “the people of God.”

So what does this story from ancient Israel have for us as Christians today?  At least two things come to mind.

1) Our identity is not a negative one.  I remember, as a young Christian, hearing lists of behaviors to be avoided.  But Christians are not primarily people who refrain from certain activities.  The whole thing begins with a negative step, that we have died to sin with Christ, but this is followed by the positive step of living a resurrection life with Him.

2) Living into this identity is a process for us, even as it was for Israel.  Eugene Peterson said in a sermon, speaking about the words we’re considering: “When this wide range of God-experience, this temptation-testing, had been assimilated, they left the wilderness and began a new life in Canaan, a life of salvation freedom.  There was no way, it seems, for them to go directly from the Red Sea baptism to Canaan freedom” (“With the Wild Beasts” in As Kingfishers Catch Fire.  Learning to live in the light of our new identity will be a process, just as it was for Israel.

The details of this will be different for each of us.  We start out in different places, and so my learning process will not be identical to anyone else’s.  One of the dangers of judging the actions of others by saying “I don’t think he is a true Christian; how could a Christian act like that?,” is that we don’t know the full story.  We don’t know where this person started out on the journey and what difficulties and setbacks he’s experienced along the way. I enjoy the novels of Evelyn Waugh, but he was reportedly a very difficult person.  According to one story, he was rude to a hostess, and when she confronted him ‘“How can you behave so badly – and you a Catholic!” Waugh replied: “You have no idea how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic. Without supernatural aid I would hardly be a human being.” (Quoted in “Seduced by the ‘Devil’ Hitler” by Francis Phillips in “The Catholic Herald).

Paul says that “it is for freedom that Christ has set us free,” but living a free life in Christ does not happen instantly.  We need to be patient with others and with ourselves, knowing that learning to live a free life in Christ is a process that will occupy the rest of our lives.